Here's my take: if that gimmick involves giving someone else something from your job that you normally wouldn't give to anyone, it's metagaming. If you are doing what you would do for anyone who asked, and it happens that you planned it out beforehand, it's not quite so clear. In general it sort of depends on how good your gimmick is, and how much you are planning to help eachother based on it.

If two assistants have silly themed names and run around doing something harmless together and clearly communicating in IC and not bothering anyone, I'm not going to ban them for it. This is a highly specific and case by case thing, and generally if your plan involves anything but being harmless and spewing memes or whatever it's probably not okay.

I might be off the mark on this though, I think a lot of people feel more like Ari in that any kind of pre-planning is bad.

I think it's the kind of thing where if you're taking the appropriate steps to plan a gimmick, not metacomm, and not metagame, then the admins probably couldn't tell that you had planned anything with someone before the game. Like what Arianya posted about leaving the spare in a box that's bad and anyone watching that go down would be able to tell. But if it's something like "I'm going to be the captain, you're going to play a ligger and do X goofy thing so I can respond with Y. That will be funny" That would probably be played out IC and no one would be the wiser anyway.

If anyone can tell that you metaplanned it ahead of time it means you probably crossed the line into an in game advantage, or weren't acting in good faith toward not metagaming.

I've always seen this as fine up to a point. If somebody in OOC says, "Go scientist next round and I will too, I'll try to show you the ropes of R&D," that's generally fine. You're just helping somebody out and it's less of a plan than a vague promise. If, on the other hand, you plan out your actions down to where you will go and meet and what you will do together, that crosses a line. There's a sort of common sense aspect to this where you have to know when you may have gone from "let's do this next round" to "let's give each other a serious meta advantage by completely planning out our next round."

You can plan some things. We've had a long term precedent that you can say what job you're planning on playing. If you and another want to do a gimmick together you can plan it out. Of course things will be on a case by case basis as always. As a general rule if what you plan to do would get you yelled at for metafriending beyond whats allowed (like giving out all access to your friend as captain) its probably a bad idea.

joining jobs together is natural. i've asked people in ooc to get in on sec before roundstart so i'm not lonecurity before.it's only a problem if you start making it a problem by going full "metagang mode" or doing it for an ic advantage.